If this is your first visit, be sure to
check out the FAQ by clicking the
link above. You may have to register
before you can post: click the register link above to proceed. To start viewing messages,
select the forum that you want to visit from the selection below.

apt-get

Either the Debian users don't know about these forums, or don't need any help so I'll get the ball rolling here!

I hate to start out on a bad note, but there is a caveat to using Debian under Virtuozzo (all Spry VPS packages.) apt-get dist-upgrade will break your system... badly!

The reason for this is the developers of Virtuozzo have been a little behind on releasing an updated OS template for use in a VPS. We're currently installing Woody (3.0). Doing an apt-get dist-upgrade will attempt to upgrade your VPS to the latest stable version, which means kernel and libc upgrades. Don't do it!

Every VPS on a hardware node shares the same kernel, and cannot be upgraded/modified from within your environment. This means when you reboot your server to load the new kernel, and the old one loads instead, your modutils and glibc will be very very confused. The only way we can recover from this is to reinstall your virtual environment, which means your disk space will be reformatted, and any customization you have done will be gone. We may be able to recover some files, but the OS will have to be reinstalled.

I have a theory that pinning the kernel-image package (and any dependent packages) to their current installed version in apt would allow apt-get dist-upgrade to work, but this has not been tested. If you have successfully used dist-upgrade, please share the knowledge here!

Please note this does not mean you cannot use apt-get update or apt-get upgrade to upgrade other applications! Have at it!

Debian Webmin VPS has been fairly painless for me so far compared to RH or FreeBSD, so you are right Lyle, I haven't needed a lot of help!

I edited the /etc/apt/sources.list, then ran apt-get update and apt-get -u upgrade. After a reboot it automagically worked for the most part.

There were a lot of 3.1 upgrades that needed to be installed, which I wonder why Spry didn't build in the default Debian 3.1 VPS installation.

I also had to reinstall anacron to get it to run logrotate since the default Spry Debian 3.1 installation didn't include all of the default configuration files, which meant anacron was never run by cron. I was wondering why my logs never rotated and finally tracked the problem to the anacron installation.

I wonder, now that Debian 4 has been out for some weeks - will it be possible at all to upgrade or will the servers be running 3.1 till the end of days? Of course all works fine now, but what will happen after the old distribution is not supported anymore in terms of security patches etc.?